12 WAKE-ROBIN 



tion of the season, among other things, has brought 

 the perfection of the song and plumage of the 

 birds. The master artists are all here; and the 

 expectations excited by the robin and the song 

 sparrow are fully justified. The thrushes have all 

 come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with 

 hands full of the pink azalea, to listen. With me, 

 the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often 

 the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager 

 delay their coming till then. In the meadows the 

 bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures 

 the field sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; 

 and the woods are unfolding to the music of the 

 thrushes. 



The cuckoo is one of the most solitary birds of 

 our forests, and is strangely tame and quiet, appear- 

 ing equally untouched by joy or grief, fear or 

 anger. Something remote seems ever weighing 

 upon his mind. His note or call is as of one lost 

 or wandering, and to the farmer is prophetic of 

 rain. Amid the general joy and the sweet assur- 

 ance of things, I love to listen to the strange clair- 

 voyant call. Heard a quarter of a mile away, from 

 out the depths of the forest, there is something 

 peculiarly weird and monkish about it. Words- 

 worth's lines upon the European species apply 

 equally well to ours : 



" blithe new-comer ! I have heard, 



I hear thee and rejoice : 

 O cuckoo ! shall I call thee bird ? 

 Or but a wandering voice ? 



